III
Greenough came first in our line of scholarly sculptors, that class to which W. W. Story later lent great lustre. A Latin inscription of five lines, beginning “Simulacrum istud” and ending “Horatius Greenough faciebat” marks the huge Washington statue. Well, if I rightly understand this sculptor, I like his “faciebat.” It seems more conscientious and less cocksure than the “fecit” with which our sculptors sometimes grace their signatures, and it is certainly not so gruff as the laconic “sc.” Between its eight letters one reads the coming and going of those seven diligent Italian years; and we shall deceive ourselves if we count those years wholly lost for our American art. If only Greenough could have enjoyed some of the surplusage of admiration given to his contemporary Powers for his Greek Slave with her well-smoothed body, her manacled Medicean hand, and the accurately fringed mantle at her feet! Though expressly advertised as a nude figure, she is dressed from top to toe in a most unfleshly hard-soft technique which our time calls incompetent, but which 1847 styled “the spiritualization of the marble.” The personality of the artist counted very largely in those days; while Greenough was scholarly and Crawford attractive, and while Randolph Rogers with his bronze doors and his Nydia was what would now be called a good “go-getter,” Hiram Powers was easily the main spellbinder of the early group.
With the exception of Rodin’s Balzac of fifty years later, no statue of the nineteenth century has ever been so famous as the Greek Slave. It is one of the paradoxes of art that this strangely ill-assorted pair go down the corridors of that great age together, united solely by the bond of greatest fame. It is worth while to examine the two, placed side by side in the museum of our minds. Both are so well known through prints and photographs that many persons who have never really seen either one face to face, now fancy that they have studied both at close range. Both are sculptural anecdotes; one is told with a leisurely abundance of detail, the other with a swift dash for the climax. The Vermonter’s statue is surely meant to be a conscientious rendering “from the Nudo,” as our grandparents phrased it, but the Frenchman, in his passion to translate into sculpture a force of literature, has gone far beyond what was to him a daily commonplace, the study of flesh. As for the mere apparel of the subject, one man has scheduled it to the last stitch, while the other has piled it up vehemently into a shapeless monolith from which emerges the triumphant head. Each sculptor doubtless threw his whole soul into revealing the spirit of the matter in hand. Which of the two has succeeded? If the parallel becomes deadly here, Mr. Powers has brought it on himself by his extraordinary fame in three countries. Everything conspired for the celebrity of the Slave,—her creation in Italy, her fortunate début in England, her travels to America, and, best of all, that body of clergymen deputed to pass upon her moral status. One can but wonder whether every last one of these took the matter seriously, or whether some one of them winked at some other during the deliberations. The sculptor made a modest number of copies of his masterpiece. But other sculptors reproduced their marble visions by the baker’s dozen, by the score. In fact, only yesterday a venerable eye-witness of those times reported that a certain American sculptor disposed of no less than two hundred marble copies of a life-sized ideal figure. Appalling iteration! One asks where all the marble came from, and whither it all went. And that sculptor apparently had no idea that in this business of the two hundred copies he was showing himself two hundred times as much salesman as artist. Fashions alter, in ethics as in art. To-day, such a practitioner would hardly be persona grata in the National Sculpture Society.